[ben_w]

There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.

Is it the reflectance/emission? Perhaps, Kindles are better than iPads; is it the resolution? Perhaps, retina iPads are better than pre/non-retina tablets; is it the tactile sensation? Perhaps, I find matt paper better than the gloss of many magazines, and the new Paperwhite is half way between on that score.

Perhaps I'm just remembering good times from my childhood, and skeuomorphisms are a way to catch that.

But no, a 3D animation like this is not the reason why apps are bloated. Other similar animations were smooth on a 450 MHz G3.

[Aaargh20318]

> There is something about reading on a screen which just isn't quite as "good" as reading on paper. I don't know what it is.

For me it’s the exact opposite. I read a lot, mostly on my Kindle Oasis (139 titles this year so far according to Kindle Insights) and on the very rare occasion I read a paper book I’m reminded how annoying reading paper books is.

There are several issues with reading paper books:

First, the physical format, long books are thick and unwieldy. There is no comfortable way to read in bed. You either read laying on your back, holding the book above your face, which is uncomfortable to hold and tires your arms. When laying on your side the fact that books fold in the middle is super annoying, if you open the book at a 90° angle you can only really read one page and you have to turn yourself after every page. Holding it open fully also isn’t comfortable.

Next, there is the light issue. Paper only reflects light, meaning you always need an external light source. It’s much easier for me to immerse myself in a story reading in a dark room. Another issue with external light is that you have to orient yourself relative to the light source. Again, when reading in bed this is a problem if your light source is on your nightstand. If you turn to a different side you are lying in your own shadow.

Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment. Getting my hands on them in the first place would also be a problem. I can browse books online and find something I’m in the mood for right now and be reading it in 30 seconds instead if waiting days for delivery. I can binge through a series in days instead of weeks.

No, I really don’t want to go back to dead tree books and I can’t believe people put up with the inconvenience when there is no longer a need to.

[disconcision]

i mostly agree... i think a lot of people haven't tried the more recent higher-end e-readers... i'd say both the oasis and the kobo forma are getting quite close to strict improvements on the trade paperback... i still love a good, well-worn <400 page mass-market paperback sometimes though, truly the greatest height of the dead-tree format. e-readers haven't seen dramatic technical improvement, but response times have gotten a lot faster, and manufacturers have pretty much all finally figured out physical buttons for page turning is the way to go.

last time i read a trade paper, the weight and lighting issues dominated any of the pleasant tactility of paper.

that said, i do miss the random-access characteristics of physical books: being able to have fingers between multiple pages to skip between sections and the ability to quickly visually binary-search for something. these seem solvable but require some master UI work

[qu4z-2]

> finally figured out physical buttons for page turning is the way to go

Oh thank goodness. I'm not sure how many more years my Kindle 4 has in it...

[ben_w]

My Kindle Keyboard only died at the start of November, FWIW.

[bentley]

> Last, there is the problem of logistics. As I said I go through a lot of books. If I had to buy these physically I would have run out of storage space years ago. Books would be piling up all over my apartment.

The other side of that is discoverability. So much of my fondness for reading today comes from the fact that I grew up in a house packed with books, practically a shelf in every room, and as a child it was so easy to just pick a book off the shelf and start reading.

The Kindle Oasis is my preferred way to read now, but if when I was a child my dad had read everything electronically, would I be reading (e)books today, or would I have never read enough casually to develop a love of the medium?

That’s why in 2022 I keep the bookshelves in my house overflowing.

[iggldiggl]

Likewise, I find that browsing through a bookstore or library is still much more enjoyable than trying the same thing with an online shop when I don't have a certain book in mind and am just trying to discover some random bit of reading.

[BuckyBeaver]

It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it. This simple fact was ignored for the last 30+ years of OS vendors pushing inverse color schemes on us. I see it as a vestige of the "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s/early '90s, which sought to make the computer screen an analogy for a piece of paper. Or Apple's attempt to look "different."

Now all of a sudden people finally realized that reading dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day is a shitty way to work, and vendors have backpedaled clumsily to offering a hard-coded "dark mode." But we already had an even-better solution: Windows let users set up their own system-wide color scheme, from Windows 3.1 through XP or even Vista. Any properly-constructed application would inherit the system colors for various on-screen elements and guarantee legibility. If you wanted to change the look of all your applications, you had one central place to do it. And if, as a developer, you wanted to guarantee a color scheme, all you had to do was make sure you overrode both foreground and background colors.

But Microsoft actually REMOVED that capability just in time for it to become desirable to more people than ever. Brilliant.

[orbital-decay]

>It's because paper doesn't EMIT light; it only reflects it.

What's the difference? I've seen it repeated over and over and it never made any sense. If your screen is too bright compared to the environment, turn it down. The only practical difference seems to be uniformity - screens are much more uniform. No shadows, no dependency on the angle to the light source etc. Which is... great?

[quesera]

The first things that springs to my mind is that the spectrum of emitted light from an active display is different from that of reflected sunlight/artificial light off of paper made from pulp/linen/cotton.

Active displays can be fatiguing for a variety of reasons, including brightness as you mention, but also the "unnatural" light spectrum.

Also, of course, blue light is believed to affect your circadian rhythm, so can cause disturbances after sundown. Most ebook readers have adjustments for this though.

[BuckyBeaver]

It's a good question. One thing is that the brightness of the page will always be appropriate for the ambient light, since it is determined by that light.

Beyond that, I'd speculate that screens don't retain as much contrast when you turn their brightness down, compared to physical materials presenting similar "brightness" under ambient light. But really that's just some talking out the ass with no research to back it up.

[plonk]

Screens aren't precise and aren't natural. If you have good enough vision or a bad enough screen, you see that it's a bunch of squares that try to imitate shapes, and even have spaces between them.

Also, the lighting looks fake. Even on good modern screens, there's a billboard feeling I can't ignore. I think that's your reflectance/emission point; it's not light reflecting on an object like literally everything you look at, it's an object blasting light at you trying to make it look real.

[kaba0]

Even many low-end devices have better screens nowadays than to see pixels themselves. Also, I don’t get this “natural” point, reading itself is unnatural and not too healthy, not because of light reflection vs emission, but because focusing on one point for a long time, which is the same in both types of reading.